


Kiss and Makeup

by VioletSmith



Category: Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: First Kiss, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Makeup
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-01
Updated: 2020-01-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:35:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22075582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VioletSmith/pseuds/VioletSmith
Summary: Spock does Bones's makeup.This started with a conversation about how Spock seems to visibly be wearing makeup in TOS, and my headcanon that he wears makeup just because he does, no big deal.
Relationships: Leonard "Bones" McCoy/Spock
Comments: 13
Kudos: 122





	Kiss and Makeup

**Author's Note:**

  * For [NB_Cecil](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NB_Cecil/gifts).



The doctor’s skin is cool to the touch. Spock has to quiet an unsettling compulsion to try to warm it. His own hands, naturally several degrees warmer, must feel feverish in comparison. Still, he holds McCoy’s chin steadily, and angles his face to the exact position Spock requires of him.

The doctor’s eyes are very blue, and rather dubious, but he lets himself be moved. The quiet whisperings of his mind that Spock can sense through this limited contact are trusting. He is a tactile creature, likes to touch and to be touched, though he is unused to such contact from Spock and tends to mistrust telepaths of any sort. Spock imagines letting his hot fingers settle onto the doctor’s face, imagines how cool his mind would feel, like diving into a deep pool of water on a too-warm day.

Instead he reaches for the small cup of polished black stone that sits on the table beside them, and selects one of the brushes it contains. The brush is almost as black as its container, and the handle is made out of wood. The tree this particular wood originates from is native to Vulcan, and prized for its dark colour. Spock brought these brushes with him when he first joined the Enterprise, many years ago now, and it satisfies him to know that they remain here in his quarters; a small reminder of his own origins.

The bristles are soft and straight, not tapered like an ink brush. The doctor is sitting beside him at the desk, their chairs are turned to face one another and they are close enough to be well within what a human might call _each other’s personal space_.

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

Spock raises an elegantly shaped eyebrow. “Doctor. Need I remind you that you were the one who requested...”

“Yeah, yeah.” The doctor waves his hand in the limited space between them as if swatting a fly. Spock does not let go of his chin. “But doing it to yourself’s not the same as doing it to someone else. I want that on record.”

“Noted.”

Spock watches, with some amusement, McCoy’s gaze dart from Spock’s mouth to his eyes, to his cheek, back to his mouth again.

“There is no need for concern,” Spock reassures him. “If you are unsatisfied with the result, then we need not repeat it. And the process itself can be enjoyable, I am told.”

“Told, Mister Spock? By whom?”

Spock doesn’t hesitate to reply: “The Captain.”

“Jim?! You’ve done this with _Jim_?”

“Only once, at his request. The Captain is already more than proficient in this regard; there was little I could teach him. But he informed me that he found the experience pleasurable.” And offered to reciprocate in kind. Spock thinks he will not mention this just now.

The doctor laughs, and the sensation of his breath on Spock’s face is a kind of intimacy.

“I’ll bet he did.”

“If you are quite ready doctor.” A pointed look. “Then I shall begin.” He leans in closer still. The doctor’s gaze meets his own and it feels like a challenge and an invitation all at once. “Close your eyes,” Spock instructs, and his voice has gone quiet as a murmur. The doctor, for once, obeys without argument.

Slowly, methodically, Spock dips the brush tip into a small circular pot full of soft blue powder that sits on the table amongst other similar accoutrements, and lifts it to the doctor’s left eyelid.

“Be still.”

He strokes the powdered brush over the doctor’s closed eyelid. It leaves behind a thin dusting of almost-translucent colour that Spock intends to build up in slow layers until its blueness is not quite as vivid as the doctor’s own irises. He covers the eyelid, and further up, to the eyebrow that arches much more gently than Spock’s own. Blows away, softly, any excess. Dips the slender brush again into the pot, and moves to the other eye.

“Why d’you wear makeup, anyway? Isn’t it, I don’t know, illogical or something? A _human vanity_.”

“It is not uncommon among my people.”

“That still doesn’t answer my question.”

Spock has worn makeup since he was little more than a child. He is not lying, it’s common on Vulcan, perhaps even as common as it is on Earth – and, as on Earth, equally socially acceptable for all genders. Spock finds the repetitive, methodical steps undertaken in both applying and removing it soothing, and though the Vulcan style differs in some respects from human fashions, he has found many humans find it aesthetically pleasing on him; or, at least, interesting enough to inspire comment. And several, like the doctor, have asked for a demonstration. Spock doesn’t often acquiesce. He thinks all of this is probably not the answer Doctor McCoy is looking for.

“If you will permit me, I will attempt to answer your question with one of my own. Is it vanity to wash and groom one’s body?”

“Of course not. That’s just basic hygiene.”

“But showering a little less frequently, or not combing one’s hair diligently, such things would not negatively impact a person’s health.”

“Well… no, not necessarily.”

“At what point does grooming stop being a matter of hygiene and begin to be a matter of vanity, in your opinion, doctor?”

The fond grin still sits on his face. Spock permits himself to look at it for longer than he would if the doctor’s eyes were open. “I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure it’s before this.”

Spock pauses the careful layering of colour to consider this a moment. “I would offer, instead, that personal grooming incorporates aspects of ritual, rhythm, and respect for those around us. It is as helpful to psychological health as to physical, and perhaps more so.”

“Now, Spock. Are you trying to say that lipstick is a kind of meditation?”

Spock blends a dab of misty blue into the outer corners of each eyelid. “Not in so many words. But I might say that the ritual application of it might be considered as such.”

“Still seems like an unnecessary human indulgence to me, but whatever you need to tell yourself.”

Spock blows on the right eyelid, and invites the doctor to open his eyes. He does so, and blinks them several times in the red-tinged light.

“There are artists, musicians and poets among my people, Doctor McCoy. None of these pursuits are essential for continued existence. Logical does not always mean ascetic.”

“Hmm,” the doctor grumbles. “I’m beginning to think I don’t have the first clue what it actually does mean.”

“Only beginning, doctor?”

Spock raises his eyebrows innocently. McCoy stares at him a moment before a burst of laughter escapes him, again.

“Green blooded son of a bitch.”

“Shall I continue?”

The doctor doesn’t answer verbally, but he does close his eyes again. Spock takes this as an affirmative, and selects a kohl pencil that is a shade too grey to have ever really suited his own complexion. He believes it will be much better suited to the doctor’s colouring, and warms the tip of it with his own breath to soften it. It leaves a smoky line above the doctor’s eyelashes. Spock has to hold the skin at the corner of the eye with his thumb to tauten it, and he feels a flare of McCoy’s mind licking like cold fire at the edges of his awareness. He tries to ignore it. It would be rude to intrude on the thoughts of one so clearly uncomfortable with the concept.

“Open your eyes.”

The result is aesthetically pleasing, Spock decides. The blueness of Doctor McCoy’s eyes, already impossibly alien and vivid, is emphasised still further by the framing Spock has given them.

“Say, that’s not half bad,” the doctor comments, when Spock indicates the mirror. “But what about the, uh...” He gestures, and then when Spock doesn’t seem to get it he reaches up and traces the sharp line of Spock’s cheekbone with one finger, there where the skin’s colour is deepened.

Spock’s voice sticks in his throat for a few seconds. He clears it. “All in good time, doctor.”

But he picks up a wider, softer brush and lines up other pots of powdered colour, more suitable for this area of the face.

Spock likes to darken the skin at his cheeks, though he varies which colour he chooses even more than he does with his eyes. Sometimes a rich bronze or brown. Sometimes a deep pink or red based tone, when he wishes to appear more human, or less inhuman. Very occasionally, a shade of green that matches the natural colour of his blood flushing the capillaries close to the skin.

He tries to imagine that green flush on the doctor’s skin, and somehow the resulting image sparks a heat in him that he does not wish to examine too closely.

He picks a dusky colour. The muted quality of a vibrant colour left to age in strong light.

The doctor’s skin is papery fine under his fingers. The soft vulnerability of it is incongruous with the roughness he normally exudes. Spock finds it fascinating.

“There,” he says, eventually, when he is done and the bones of McCoy’s cheeks shadowed and contoured. But this time the doctor takes far longer to look away from Spock’s face to the mirror.

“Wow,” he breathes this time, and his fingers come up to touch his own face. “That’s quite a difference.”

They are almost done. Spock finds himself illogically wishing it had taken longer. “It is nearly complete. There is only your-”

“My mouth.”

Doctor McCoy’s mouth smiles, now, in one corner only, as if at a secret. He licks his lips.

Spock must move closer still for this. He sits up straight so that he is taller than the doctor, holding his face motionless in his hands, looking down at the natural pinkness of those lips. He uses the thinnest brush to stroke a softening ointment onto them in dozens of tiny, precise strokes. Under his hands he feels the doctor’s heart rate pick up and then slow, and the barely-there fog of his thoughts and emotions echoes this brief tension and then calm. So very calm, and Spock wants to point out that this is exactly where the meditative properties of lipstick may be observed, but something stops him.

Instead, before he can instruct himself not to, he touches the newly softened lower lip with the pad of his thumb. He tells himself it is to test how well the ointment has worked, or if more will be needed. He lingers, perhaps, too long. The doctor is staring at him now as if he’s a complicated medical problem that eludes diagnosis.

Suddenly, Spock feels the cool wetness of the the doctor’s tongue touch his thumb like a shock of thunder, and jerks his hand away.

They say nothing for a moment. Spock stares at his own hand. He can still feel it, the dampness of the doctor’s saliva growing tacky on the end of his thumb. The fingertips, where Vulcan telepathic sensitivities are strongest.

“Well, Spock?” McCoy asks, eventually, and his voice is quieter, his accent thicker than Spock is used to. “What colour lipstick have you decided on?”

“I. I think...”

“Yeah?”

Spock forces himself to turn and face him again. His eyes are drawn, helplessly, to his mouth. “I find, doctor… that I cannot conceive of any that would improve on the natural colour.” He watches the doctor swallow, the press of his lips and the bob of his throat. He sets the thin brush down flat on the table. “My recommendation is to leave the area bare.”

As Spock watches, McCoy smiles. Not the grin of before, nor the secretive half-smile. Something sleeker. Warmer. He lays a hand over Spock’s where it lies on the table, his palm against the back of Spock’s fingers. Spock isn’t sure if the doctor is aware of exactly how obscene this caress is, to a Vulcan. The physical touch is still human-cool, but there is an unspeakable heat behind it.

“Bare, Mister Spock?”

Still staring at where their hands are touching, Spock nods an affirmative.

“And are your lips bare, too?”

Spock regrets his choice of wording. If Doctor McCoy keeps repeating the word _bare_ he will not be held responsible for his actions.

“I sometimes wear...” The doctor’s free hand catches his chin, just as Spock had done to position him initially, and draws Spock’s gaze away from their joined hands to his own, freshly decorated face. “Yes,” Spock says, and it could be in response to the spoken question or the unspoken.

The first touch of their lips is far deeper and less hurried than he would have imagined, if he had ever allowed himself to imagine it before this moment. It is like something vibrant aged in strong sunlight. Like the sensation of desert sand under his feet, or a familiar face in new colours. The end of a long voyage home.


End file.
